http://store.apple.com/Apple/WebObjects/ukstore

New mac desktop machine, Mac Pro.

Hmmm

Looks like a big cheese grater. :lol:

Has a poor graphics card in that spec to.

Processor looks top banana though. :)

Time to buy shares in Adobe then :lol:

B

I wonder if they're gonna find it notably harder to shift these things now you can basically spec a PC with the exact same components in a less pretty case... (I'm genuinely curious, not taking the **** :))

HB

Naah, Apple's marketing will step in to fill the void left by any hardware shortfalls.

B

I wonder if they're gonna find it notably harder to shift these things now you can basically spec a PC with the exact same components in a less pretty case... (I'm genuinely curious, not taking the **** :))

HB

Would it not work the other way, or at least there exist the potential thereof? I mean, what with Boot Camp and Apple's own dual-boot setup imminent, would people not feel tempted to switch to Mac and have the "luxury" (I'll leave others to debate that) of OSX, the "comfort" of XP/Vista, and the looks (I know...) of a Mac? Granted they cost a small fortune and looks are, well, not particularly important with a PC, but then again the same can be said of iPods, and they've done OK.

There's already been some crossover effect (via the iPod). The prettiness of OS X has not (up till now) really been a big motivator, and Apple's previous line was always "our hardware's better" (debatable at best). As Benny says, their marketing team will come up with something, but you can bet it won't be "our hardware's the same, we just charge you more for it" :D

At the end of the day, PCs (in general) are getting cheaper. I'm not just talking Moore's Law, but also the fact that the average price is getting lower. This just makes it harder for Apple to poach the average PC user. Their best chance remains with the people with money to burn.

HB

According to the conference opening show/speech, the mac is gaining market share against the pc, they have examples of there computers costing less than a similar spec Dell, they have more internal room so can take four HD's instead of the previous 2, upto 16gb of ram, 2 dual xeon 2, 2.66 or 3 ghz processors.

You have to remember this is the fastest mac they make and is around 2 times faster than the last quad power pc mac which is still available from about £2,299. Alot of people will be very happy with the advancements in this model.

You can now have 2tb of HD space in the computer, 16 gb of ram, you can upgrade the graphics cards if you choose to, you can have 4 of the standard cards if you want, to power more screens, or upgrade to a more powerfull ati or nvidia card.

You can have a multi 30" screen setup if you choose.

They had a nice segment showing how windows vista copied most of OS X's technology, even though they didn't mean for microsoft to literally copy OS X's features and programs.

OS X 10.5 also has some interesting sounding features so far, time machine sounds interesting, as well as spotlights ability to search other remote machines for files over network etc. They also seem to be bringing in unix's ability to use multiple screens that you can switch between like you have been able to on linux etc for ages, but a handy feature none the less.

plus, if you are student, you get about £250 off one of these, and a free ipod nano - a decent savinfor sure :)

plus, if you are student, you get about £250 off one of these, and a free ipod nano - a decent savinfor sure :)

I want to be a student!

id burn money on one.. sadly ive over 5k of software that wont work brilliantly on the intel macs so im not going to be busting a gut to get one :)

id burn money on one.. sadly ive over 5k of software that wont work brilliantly on the intel macs so im not going to be busting a gut to get one :)

i'm sure the upgrade costs between software versions wont be huge though or they'll end up alienating their main customer base.

photoshop is about £150 to upgrade i think. not really cheap but so long as they add more usable features like they did between ps7 and cs/cs2 it's a little more justifiable.

i specced the top powermac on the apple site and it came to 11k. time to go knock over my local bank methinks :)

Is it worth paying £500 for the 3.0ghz processors instead of the 2.66? Or would i be better of upgrading the ram to 4gb?!

According to the conference opening show/speech, the mac is gaining market share against the pc

Lesson 1 - don't take too much notice of charts produced in these style of presentation. Yes they are gaining market share but did they show what thier market share was, nope why because what looks like a massive gain is in fact still a tiny amount of the market.

Its starting to look better for your money now although there are other poeple out there selling similar systems for a fair bit less and DIYers can well and truly beat it.

Thing is, Apple are going to have to do something pretty impressive to justify their move. It's all well and good having OSX out there, but if it will boot on standard PC architecture, the marketeers must be working flat out to justify the reason why anyone would want to spend money on Mac "hardware" as opposed to generic PC kit.

Mac OSX going head-to-head with Linux. Now that I would love to see. In the red corner...a legion of nerds, crazed on Coca Cola and Dominos. In the blue corner, a team of musicians, architects and interior designers in Gucci trunks...:D

B

With the amount of enthusiasts out there its now VERY easy to build a PC that will run OSX stable as any apple computer. That said they will not sell OSx86 due to the lack of support for 3rd party hardware. The KEY to apple success is the fact people think that apples don't crash, can't be hacked, don't have problems etc. If they start selling OSX lots of people will have problems getting it to work which would make apple look bad (even though its the 3rd prty vendors fault)

Mac OSX going head-to-head with Linux. Now that I would love to see. In the red corner...a legion of nerds, crazed on Coca Cola and Dominos. In the blue corner, a team of musicians, architects and interior designers in Gucci trunks...:D


lol just the thing after sitting through a meeting with a bunch of MAC zeiloits the other day bickering about support of safari

I honestly dont see the point in macs any more if they run xp they are no prettier really and definatly not more reliable trying to get our one to see the ad tree involves it being fine for two to three days then loosing its bind entirely/randomly. :o

According to the conference opening show/speech, the mac is gaining market share against the pc, they have examples of there computers costing less than a similar spec Dell, they have more internal room so can take four HD's instead of the previous 2, upto 16gb of ram, 2 dual xeon 2, 2.66 or 3 ghz processors......

......You can now have 2tb of HD space in the computer, 16 gb of ram, you can upgrade the graphics cards if you choose to, you can have 4 of the standard cards if you want, to power more screens, or upgrade to a more powerfull ati or nvidia card.

You can have a multi 30" screen setup if you choose.

Now tell me, genuinely, what parts of that you think cannot be done on a PC / WIntel platform? Or at least, wont be possible once Vista is released.

2Tb of internal storage is pretty simple - four 750Gb SATA drives and you've got 3TB online.

Graphics...a couple of GeForce 7950s in SLi config is doable.

Screen...The graphics cards above support HDMI, so you can scale that as high as you like really. A decent 42" Plasma with a good resolution should suffice.

Memory...I've yet to see a system which needs more than 4Gb of system RAM, to be honest!

B

And there you have my point... :)

I struggle to find any reason other than 'it's pretty' to buy a Mac. I really do. Don't get me wrong, I'm not Anti-Mac at all... in fact I'm tempted to chop in my Sony XP Laptop for an iMac because I've not owned one before.

But I don't see the benefits these days. Security / Virus threats etc is more to do with market coverage than design of the OS. If Mac had as many PC's world wide as Microsoft I have no doubt the number of security threats would increase by the same rate. But from a hacker / script kiddie point of view, why aim at something that has less exposure and less possible victims?

Most, if not all, software available on Mac is available on Windows and does just a good a job. A well designed, built and configured Windows PC will be as stable as you could hope for. Mac is far from crash free, by a long shot!

So what other reason is there to buy a Mac?

According to the conference opening show/speech, the mac is gaining market share against the pc,

I liked that one:

One amusing graph showed the rise and rise of OS X, which Jobs claims now has 19 million active users. Naturally he didn't say this was equivalent to roughly 10 weeks of Windows XP users. He also failed to enhance the graph by contrasting the rise of OS X with the rapid delcine of, say, Windows 98, which has now been abandoned and is fading into insignificance with only 70 million or so users.

From tehGrauniad's technology blog...

The Mac should have died a long time ago. Imagine a world full of Amiga technology, no iPlops and no Steve Jobs.

Hurrah! :D